OUT OF EDEN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

In 1988 Newsweek broke the news that everyone alive on the planet today carries DNA that can be traced back to a single woman living in Africa over 150,000 years ago. Modern humans are truly 'out of Africa'. But how, when and why we left our motherland was open to question and until very recently most experts believed that many waves of ex-African migration had resulted in a gradual populating of the world.

With a systhesis of new genetic, archaeological and climatic evidence, Stephen Oppenheimer challenges the orthodoxy by arguing that all modern non-Africans can be shown to have sprung from a single exodus. One migrant group of no more than a few hundred souls was forced out of its homeland by increasing salinity in the Red Sea, some 85,000 years ago, and all non-Africans today can trace their mitochondrial DNA to one woman from this group - the Out-of-Africa Eve.

Praise for Out of Eden

'A wonderful, very readable book, written by an expert: Stephen Oppenheimer explains how our genes hold clues to the origin of our species, and tell the story of how our ancestors colonised the world.' Dr Alice Roberts, University of Bristol, Author of "The Incredible Human Journey"

Stephen Oppenheimer trained in medicine at Oxford and London universities, qualifying in 1971. From 1972 he worked as a clinical paediatrician, mainly in Malaysia, Nepal and Papua New Guinea. He carried out and published clinical research in the areas of nutrition, infectious disease (including malaria), and genetics, focussing on the interactions between nutrition, genetics and infection, in particular iron nutrition, thalassaemia and malaria. He returned to England in 1997, writing the book Eden in the East: the drowned continent of Southeast Asia, published in 1998. The book synthesised work across a range of disciplines, including oceanography, archaeology, linguistics, social anthropology and human genetics. He continued to write books and articles, and began a second career as a researcher and popular-science writer on human prehistory. He worked as consultant on two television documentary series, The Real Eve (Discovery Channel) and Out of Eden (Channel 4), and published a second book, Out of Eden: the Peopling of the World (retitled The Real Eve in USA). This was followed in 2006 by The Origins of the British: a genetic detective story, on the post-glacial peopling of Great Britain and Ireland. In 2009 he was consultant on the BBC TV series The Incredible Human Journey. Stephen Oppenheimer’s research forms the basis of the Bradshaw Foundation's Journey of Mankind Genetic Map, adapted from 'Out of Eden' / 'The Real Eve', and he is a member of the Foundation's Advisory Board.